6. Foresight

6.1 Areas of research and development

Waste disposal is an eminently complex field, whose concepts, techniques and impacts are still a source of imagination and need for knowledge to guide political, strategic and economic choices and decisions. Research and development work will draw on a wide range of disci- plines:

• fundamental sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, applied to geology, hydrogeology, mechanics, geotechnics, mass and heat transfer, etc. ;

• the so-called "soft" sciences (in comparison with the preceding "hard" sciences), such as social sciences, communication sciences, information sciences, health sciences, ecology, etc.

The work and experiments are aimed...